Pattern identification and language learning

A few weeks ago I read an article reporting on a scientific study which had found that students who are good at abstract pattern matching tasks perform better in Hebrew language lessons. (Unfortunately I don't have access to the original journal paper.)

Now, we have two ways of interpreting this outcome: the fatalistic and the optimistic.

The fatalistic interpretation

A fatalist will say that it is proof positive of the existence of talent, and that those who do not have this talent are doomed to failure at learning languages.

The optimistic interpretation

The optimistic interpretation is to say that the successful learners are succeeding despite the teaching, and that this study is, by shedding new light on what the successful learners actually do, showing what teachers should be doing if they want to be successful.

"Rules" are a bit out of fashion in language teaching.  I've always said that this is because people have been teaching incorrect rules, rather than that rules are inherently unsuited to language teaching.  A linguistic "rule" is (or should be, at least) nothing more than an observed pattern emerging from real usage.  If successful learners are those who can identify patterns, then we must assume that after identifying these patterns, they learn them.

So I would suggest that the logical conclusion is that we should be teaching these patterns to students, rather than relying on them identifying them.

An example pattern

When I was learning French (my first foreign language) at high school, I noticed the distinction between the "long conjugations" and the "short conjugations" of the present tense (the long conjugations are the nous and vous forms, and the short conjugations are the rest), and I noticed that in irregular verbs, these forms were almost always regular.  (Is there any verb other than être that has irregular long conjugations?)

So while my classmates were attempting to memorise the irregular verb tables by rote, I was saving myself time and effort by only memorising the conjugations that didn't arise out of bog standard, regular conjugation.

Now it could be that the advocates of the discovery method are right, and that part of my success was down to the fact that I worked this out for myself, but I doubt it.  And even if that's true, is it fair to trade off the success of the majority against the success of a lucky few?  It is obvious that being told this would have reduced the effort required by my classmates to learn their irregular verbs.

Teaching patterns vs teaching rules

The problem with most of the "rules" traditionally presented in grammar books is that they are more strictly ranked and regimented than they are in real life.  Real patterns in real language can't be so neatly packaged by tense.

Take one of the patterns in Spanish taught by Michel Thomas:
The third person plural conjugation of a verb is the third person singular conjugation plus N, except in the preterite.

Now that's not how he taught it, but that's the concise description.  When he taught it, he simply used it in the present, and then got the students to apply it in the other tenses.

One of the reasons some people don't like this pattern is that "except" bit, but this really isn't a problem, because the pattern also holds for the second person singular: third singular +S, except (again) in the preterite.

It's regular, it's predictable.  Even the "exception" is regular in that it's an exception for both 2S and 3P.

This is the sort of pattern that I suspect all those successful learners are finding, and this is the sort of pattern that made Thomas such an effective teacher.

So let's find those patterns, and let's teach them.

My new favourite journal.

I have a new favourite journal, even though I've only ever read two articles from it.  I searched my old blog posts for a reference to the first one, but shockingly, it would appear I've never actually mentioned it here.

The journal in question is Psychological Science in the Public Interest, compiled by the Association for Psychological Science.  The APS describes the journal:

"a unique journal featuring comprehensive and compelling reviews of issues that are of direct relevance to the general public. These reviews are written by blue ribbon teams of specialists representing a range of viewpoints, and are intended to assess the current state-of-the-science with regard to the topic."

Note that term "reviews of issues".  All too commonly, journals are full of individual papers that are too technical for anyone outside of the field of study, and pushing the point of view of the authors/researchers involved.

Not so PSPI.  Here we have a journal dedicated to identifying important research and summarising the state of knowledge and quality of research across the subject, such that people outside the research field can base their practices on the evidence.  This calls to mind Ben Goldacre's submission to the UK government, Building Evidence into Education, as even teachers who attempt to follow new findings tend to be tricked into following ideologically-led movements through the difficulty in obtaining actual evidence.

Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence
The first article that brough PSPI to my attention was entitled Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence (free to read as PDF), and it reviewed the evidence supporting the extremely popular notion of "learning styles" in education, concluding that

"at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning styles assessments into general educational practice. Thus, limited education resources would better be devoted to adopting other educational practices that have strong evidence base, of which there are an increasing number."

Note that the article never claims that learning styles don't exist, or that research into learning styles should cease, but that the current state of knowledge of learning styles offers no demonstrable benefit to the classroom teacher.  This kicked off a bit of controversy which is summarised briefly on Wikipedia: the reviewers chose the papers to include based on the rigour of their experimental design, which led them to omit many of the most cited papers on learning styles, which only goes to show that the most cited papers are not in any position to prove anything, having employed sub-standard experimental methodologies.

(I discovered the paper via a forum link to an article on Chronicle.com)

Improving Students' Learning with Effective Learning Techniques
The second article, which I stumbled upon thanks to a friend linking to a Time magazine article on Facebook.  It's called Improving Students' Learning with Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Education Psychology, and it reviews the literature supporting 10 different study techniques, concluding that most of what students do to study isn't particularly effective.  It's also worth noting that a lot of what they advise against is precisely what I was told to do in "study skills" lessons at high school and university.  As has been observed by many people, what is taught in study skills classes and what successful students actually do are two very different things....

I'll hopefully give a more in-depth review of the article once term's over and I'm able to devote a bit more time to it, but I'd like to also note that they make the mistake of criticising cramming without the qualification that cramming, while not the best way to learn, is still the best way to pass an exam, and that our school system still rewards it as a practice (particularly when you know that you're not continuing with the subject next year).  In fact, one training course I took at work several years ago was just two days of cramming followed immediately by the exam.  When one of the delegates asked the trainer why the exam wasn't a week later, the trainer said (with a straight face!) that they'd tried that and more people failed.  He completely missed the point that this really was in no way a good reflection on his teaching methods.

Is language subconscious?

Is language subconscious?  It's a question I hadn't given much thought to -- I'd always pretty much taken it for granted that it was.

Well anyway, apparently it's been a pretty contentious topic in linguistics and psychology for a while now, but a group of scientists from Hebrew University have found compelling evidence that it is, indeed, subconscious.  (And not only "language" language, but even symbolic mathematical language to an extent).

Discussing this elsewhere called to mind a time when I was working on learning Scottish Gaelic with the aid of a piece of software.  It flashed the word "eye" up on the screen, and I couldn't translate it.  I had a complete block.  I knew the word.  I knew I knew the word.  But it wouldn't come.

It felt to me like my brain didn't believe it was "eye", and that it wasn't sure it wasn't "I", or "aye" (or possibly even "ay").

The way I see it, a conscious language skill should have allowed me to override this confusion through conscious attention to the written form, which is (in theory) unambiguous.  The fact that I couldn't force my way through to the correct meaning suggested that language is something you have less conscious control over than you think....

But fair enough, I've always felt that contextless words are very much a first step, and that for the most part you should be practising in context.  This experience kind of confirmed it for me.

But the publishing of the findings came at the perfect time for me, having just written the draft of my last blog post about translation, and the way I automatically translated frames of reference (eg using the first person when the software says "you are..." etc), because that's the source of my dilemma:

Translation is effective precisely because native language is understood subconsciously.  You understand and internalise the meaning effortlessly.  This means you know exactly what message you want to express in the target language.  There is no other means for a teacher, book or software package to indicate so clearly to a learner what do say.  Also, there is no other means to ensure that the teacher knows exactly what the student is trying to say (I've heard many teachers "correct" students errors by leading them to say something that is valid in the target language, but completely different in meaning to what they intended to say).

Translation is ineffective if and whenever the native language is not understood subconsciously.  Too many courses present contrived, meaningless examples.  Perhaps these aren't quite as nonsensical as the examples the researchers from Hebrew University used, but as long as they are unnatural, they will interfere with subconscious processing, leaving the learner to process them consciously -- it's not "translation" that's the real problem here, it's "word juggling".

And translation's weak spot is the one I mentioned in my last blog post: our subconscious deals with relative references automatically.  When you say the word "I" to me, I understand the concept of you, the person speaking.  So dealing with first and second person pronouns is a perilous task.  In order to do it correctly, the student has to stop using their subconscious processing, and language starts to become a conscious process... which is when translation stops working as a language learning technique.

This leads me to a conclusion that I really didn't expect, and that I'm not yet fully convinced of:
the optimal mixture of native-language instruction and target-language instruction in the classroom isn't a simple function of how advanced the students are, it goes right down to the level of "I" vs "he".

Wow.

Ooooh... it looks like I was wrong....

For years, I've been toeing the line that non-native languages never become like native languages, and that there's two language processing mechanisms in the brain: one for the infant learner, and one for the adult-learner.  This was science's best guess based on the data they had to hand: victims of "selective aphasia".  These people had suffered brain damage that had affected their abilities in languages, but not equally across languages.  The observed pattern was that all native languages would be affected more or less equally, and all non-native languages would be affected more or less equally, but the two would often be differently affected.
Well, via an article in the New York Times, I came across this paper at PLoS ONE that says otherwise.  Apparently they've been able to track the brainwaves of learners and find that there are similarities between the brainwaves of a proficient learner and patterns typical of the native.  This I find really cool.  (I wish I could afford a brainscanner so that I could measure my proficiency in terms of native-like brainwaves!!)

I'm concerned, though, that one thing they say will be overinterpreted:

Interestingly, both before and after the delay the implicitly trained group showed more native-like processing than the explicitly trained group, indicating that type of training also affects the attainment of native-like processing in the brain.

There are many people who advocate immersion from day one, and this would appear to be proof of the efficacy of the approach.  However, we are dealing with a very simple language here -- 13 words and a handful of extra inflectional morphemes, leading to a sum total of 1404 possible sentences in the language.  Even if the grammar's very different from English, there's still a very small number of "decision points" to be considered, so it is much easier to devine the meaning from the context -- this is something that just doesn't match the experience with real language.

They do, of course, admit as much in the body of the paper:

it may be that the results reported here are due to the limited size of the artificial language

Furthermore, the study says:

In the explicit training condition, participants were provided with 13.5 minutes of input of a type similar to that found in traditional grammar-focused classroom settings. Auditorily-presented metalinguistic explanations structured around word categories (e.g., nouns, verbs) were presented along with meaningful Brocanto2 phrases and sentences (which were also auditorily-presented, together with visually-presented corresponding game board configurations).

It's a shame the paper doesn't include the script.  My concern here is with the mention of "metalinguistic explanations".  Explicit instruction does not necessarily mean a lot of "metalinguistic" explanations -- yes, it will always require some, but often what starts out as an explanation overcomplicates things with unnecessary jargon and overly conscious processing.  Finely tuned explicit input can be very clear to the learner even if it looks messy on paper, and poorly tuned explicit input can be nigh-on impenetrable to the learner even if it looks neat on paper.

Which is why I object when they claim that:

A second possibility is that at end of training the explicit group's dependence on explicit, declarative memory-based knowledge resulted in the inhibition of the learning or use of procedural knowledge (see above), thus precluding anterior negativities. On this view, explicit training actually prevents, or at least slows, the development of native-like processing.

It is impossible for them to state that explicit training in particular prevents anything -- but that the training that they provided did.  (Of course, if I was to see their scripts, I'd definitely find fault with them, but that could always be me rationalising away anything that disagrees with me -- classic confirmation bias.  We're all guilty of it at times.)

Anyway, despite their statements about the difference between the explicit and implicit instruction, the  study does state towards the end:

the implication of declarative and procedural memory in this study is consistent with the predictions made by the declarative/procedural model for second language acquisition. This neurocognitive model posits that during L2 learning grammar initially depends largely on declarative memory, but that gradually aspects of grammar are increasingly learned and processed in procedural memory.

I am heartened to see that they haven't out-and-out supported the hardline distinction between "learning" and "acquisition" that Krashen and his ilk propose.

So it looks like I may have been wrong about the neurological differences between native and adult-learned languages, and I might still be proven wrong about the benefits of explicit vs implicit instruction, but this is not the study that proves that one.  If and when one comes along, I'll rethink my position.  Until then, I'll stick with what I currently believe.

Passive vs Active

I read an interesting article on Wired.com recently, relating to a paper in the Journal of Neuroscience.  The study looked at a small set of musical skills.  Common wisdom is that you can only learn music by performing it, which is analogous to learning language by production.  Previous studies support this, and prove that you can't learn to play music just by listening, which is analogous to language learning by practicing receptive skills.

The study noted that previous research has focussed on an all-or-nothing approach -- all practice or no practice -- and instead looked at the effects on passive perception in addition to practice, and they claim that timed right, it's just as effective to spend 50% of your time listening to what you've just learned.  They are, of course, talking about fairly early learners, as professional level musicians can show remarkable skills in learning and playing new music.

This makes a great deal of sense to me -- I have always said that I can only understand something that I can say (or, in the case of language I've forgotten, could have said previously).  This doesn't mean that I ever would say it, but that it is possible in my internal model of the language.  This, I feel, is analogous to the example of musicians.

A beginner in both fields has a small set of "devices" to employ (specific notes and practised combinations thereof vs specific words and practised combinations of them) and neither is going to be able to directly relate to any material that goes beyond that set.  As the learner develops in both fields, the set of devices grows, and the learner will be able to generalise to all material made up of items within their arsenal of devices.  Thus the musician who masters one style of music will be able to play any piece in that style by ear, because it is a recombination of musical devices he knows, but will not be able to do the same for a piece in a radically different style.  The language learner with high fluency and proficiency in his new language will be able to understand lots of individual sentences that he has never heard before but are composed of language he knows, but if someone says an idiomatic phrase he has never learned, he obviously can't understand it -- are you hip to my jive, man?

If this research proves to hold true for language learning as it does for musical skills, then the language teaching industry is missing a trick by producing materials that students can't understand in their entirety.  Perhaps instead students would be better listening to things that they have just been taught to say, even if they can only say them shakily.  Some lessons in the Pimsleur method do this, repeating at the end of the lesson the dialogue that was used to teach that lesson.  Assimil teaches you from a dialogue, and then asks you to listen to the dialogue again once you've learned it all, without reading any notes, so that you understand it in its entirety. This may be a lazy way to do it, because it doesn't really require true understanding, but many people are happy with it.  It's curious then that neither Teach Yourself nor Colloquial, the two biggest book-shelf brands available in the UK, give the learner any instruction to relisten to each lesson's dialogues at the end of the lesson.  It seems like a pretty quick win -- at present the dialogue is only listened to before the presentation of the associated language points, when the learner will most likely understand almost none of it.

Personally I would like to see the post-learning listening being a new and unheard piece, but built up of the elements used earlier in the lesson.  This is easier said than done, though.  If you start from a situational point of view (Chapter 1: Greetings, Chapter 2: Meet the family etc), then you are going to be recycling the same phrases and it will be an almost identical dialogue to what's been used in the lesson.  If you go from a grammar-led course, on the other hand, it's going to be difficult to find anything interesting to say, and you're likely to end up with something that sounds quite contrived.

It's a difficult one.

(NB.  The Journal of Neuroscience isn't available in my university library, so I've only read the abstract.)